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Lara Marinov Hello! Buna! Guten Tag! Bonjour ! Buongiorno! Zdravo! Ahoj!

/’lɑːɹə m'e:ɹɪnˌɔːv/

I am a first-year Ph.D. student in the ECE department at UT Austin advised by Prof. Milos Gligoric and Prof. Jessy Li.

I graduated in Fall 2025 with my B.S. in Computer Science with concentrations in Software Engineering and Language Technologies from Carnegie Mellon University. I was on an exchange semester at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Spring 2025.

I’m passionate about solving real-world problems that involve both programming and human languages. My interests lie at the intersection of NLP and software engineering, where AI can improve the way we build and interact with software.

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News

Oct 2026
I attended SPLASH/ISSTA 2026 in Oakland, presented our work on PrEx at the LMPL workshop, participated as a student volunteer, and met a lot of cool people!
Sept 2026
Our paper Twist, Don't Tilt: Trajectory-Exact Constrained Decoding for Masked Diffusion Models is available on arXiv now.
Aug 2026
Our paper Predicting Program Exit Code with LLMs and Programming Language Semantics is accepted at LMPL 2026 and available on arXiv now.
Aug 2026
I've been selected as a student volunteer for the SPLASH/ISSTA 2026 conference in Oakland, USA.

Research

My research interests span various topics in NLP, software engineering, and linguistics.

Predicting Program Exit Code with LLMs and Programming Language Semantics

Lara Marinov, Aditya Thimmaiah, Jayanth Srinivasa, Junyi Jessy Li, and Milos Gligoric
International Workshop on Language Models and Programming Languages (LMPL)
Oakland, USA, October 2026
[arXiv] [pdf] [bibtex]

Discovering Functionally Selective Brain Regions with a Deep Topographic Multimodal Model

Badr AlKhamissi, Johannes Mehrer, Lara Marinov, Ahmed Abdelaal, Abdulkadir Gokce, Martin Schrimpf
Cognitive Computational Neuroscience (CCN)
Extended Abstract Accepted as a Spotlight (top 10%)
New York City, USA, August 2026
[arXiv] [pdf]

Not-Just-Scaling Laws: Towards a Better Understanding of the Downstream Impact of Language Model Design Decisions

Emmy Liu, Amanda Bertsch, Lintang Sutawika, Lindia Tjuatja, Patrick Fernandes, Lara Marinov, Michael Chen, Shreya Singhal, Carolin Lawrence, Aditi Raghunathan, Kiril Gashteovski, Graham Neubig
In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Suzhou, China, November 2025
[arXiv] [pdf]

Projects

Here's a selection of projects I've done previously.

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User Retention Analysis

We analyzed behavioral data from GoGymi, a digital study app aimed at middle school students, to identify key early signals of long-term user retention. We focused on three main research questions and used a number of ML models to analyze the data. Check out our poster for more details on our analysis. This project was done as team of three for the course "Machine Learning for Behavioral Data" at EPFL.

Poster
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Scene4M

Scene4M is an extended version of the 4M multimodal model that combines the current 4M modalities with new video and audio data to provide environment descriptions aimed at helping individuals with impaired vision navigate their surroundings. This project was done as team of four for the course "Communications Project" at EPFL.

Website PDF
Paper thumbnail

Entity Recognition

I experimented with multiple different methods of constructing demonstrations and prompts for the OpenAI LLM to try to improve its performance on token classification. I explored utilizing LLMs themselves as auxiliary tools within the overall prompt engineering process.

PDF

Service

2026
SPLASH/ISSTA — Student Volunteer
2023-2025
Member of the CS Curriculum Review Committee (CMU)

Teaching

Fall 2024
17-480/780 API Design and Implementation (CMU)
Fall, Spring 2024
17-313 Foundations of Software Engineering (CMU)
Fall 2023
17-214/514 Principles of Software Construction (CMU)

Fellowships & Awards

Fall 2026
Distinguished Graduate Fellowship
Awarded by the Department of Electrical And Computer Engineering at UT Austin
Fall 2025
CMU Senior Leadership Award
Nominated by the School of Computer Science at CMU, awarded by CMU
Fall 2025
Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society
Nominated by School of Computer Science (SCS) at CMU, selected by university-wide committee among 5/200 SCS, 18/2500 CMU students
Summer 2025
Excellence Research Internship Program
Accepted to EPFL ERIP program for outstanding Bachelor's and Master's students for a paid summer research internship
Spring 2025
Severin B. Hacker Fellowship
Awarded by the Office of International Education, CMU in partnership with EPFL
Fall 2024
Tartans Abroad Scholarship
Awarded by the Tartans Abroad Committee, Office of International Education, CMU
Fall 2024
Spring 2024
Fall 2023
Spring 2023
Dean's List with High Honors
School of Computer Science, CMU for outstanding academic performance

Personal

I collect a list of my favorite CS comic strips here.

These are some of my favorite pictures from the places I've been.

Also, I love Adam ♥